One of the best features the Kindle had on Google was that it could read your books to you through your headphones. Google has released a major update to the Google Play Books application with some pretty awesome features and enhancements.

The ‘Read Aloud’ feature is exactly what you’d request. The app is able to take the text from the book you’re reading and, in a voice that isn’t too computer-y, read the text to you over your headphones or speaker. Pro-tip: Make sure to set her voice to the ‘high quality’ sound setting to get rid of the fast computer-y sound.

That means you can read your Google Play books while you’re driving or performing manual labor (like shoveling the walk, or mowing the lawn).

They also added basic text editing features for notes. You can now annotate the books on your Google Play account, and it syncs up to your Google account so that your notes are available from any Google device.

They also added a pinch-zoom or double-tap-zoom feature for all books and fixed a bunch of bugs. It’s a great update.

Joshua Howland

Joshua is a mobile application developer, entrepreneur, and technology enthusiast. He is currently building a company that focuses on educational mobile applications: LearnStack. His favorite posts to write compare companies and products. He loves sports and start ups and talks about them (along with tech) on Twitter (@jkhowland) and his blog (jkhowland.me).